Slant: A Blackboard System to Generate Plot, Figuration, and Narrative Discourse Aspects of Stories

We introduce Slant, a system that integrates more than a decade of research into computational creativity, and specifically story generation, by connecting subsystems that deal with plot, figuration, and the narrative discourse using a blackboard. The process of integrating these systems highlights differences in the representation of story and has led to a better understanding of how story can be usefully abstracted. The plot generator MEXICA and a component of Curveship are used with little modification in Slant, while the figuration subsystem Fig-S and the template generator GRIOT-Gen, inspired by GRIOT, are also components. The development of the new subsystem Verso, which deals with genre, shows how different genres can be computationally modeled and applied to in-development stories to generate results that are surprising in terms of their connections and valuable in terms of their relationship to cultural questions. Example stories are discussed, as is the potential of the system to allow for broader collaboration, the empirical testing of how subsystems interrelate, and possible contributions in literary and artistic contexts.